If there were any doubt that CNN was less a news operation and more a transmission belt for Democratic Party propaganda, the network’s internal report on the Chris Cuomo scandal should put it to rest.
The report says Allison Gollust, the network’s marketing chief, also advised Governor Andrew Cuomo, just like his little brother, Prime Time anchor Chris Cuomo. Gollust quit two weeks ago, and her boss, CNN chieftain Jeff Zucker, quit in early February, supposedly because of their love affair.
And again as with Chris Cuomo, text messages told the tale, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Through the CNN anchor, Gollust offered advice to Andrew Cuomo about the sex-assault and harassment allegations that forced him from office. As well, the then-governor sent Gollust questions he wanted interviewers to ask him, which Gollust passed on to a CNN producer.
The Messages
The truth about the Gollust-Cuomo connection surfaced when “reviewed text messages between Ms. Gollust and Chris Cuomo,” the Journal reported:
In one of them, Ms. Gollust — who prior to working at CNN was briefly a top aide to Andrew Cuomo — sent Chris Cuomo a sentence she said she would have added to a statement that Andrew Cuomo had issued earlier that day in February of last year, after an accuser went public, some of the people said.
In another message, she asked Chris Cuomo whether another accuser ever said publicly that the then-governor had never touched her — something Ms. Gollust said Chris Cuomo had told her in a previous conversation, those people said. Ms. Gollust went on to tell Chris Cuomo that if such a statement existed, CNN should report it, they said.
There was also a message in which Ms. Gollust conversed with Chris Cuomo about the lawyers assigned by the New York attorney general to investigate Andrew Cuomo, they said.
Of course, Gollust denies it all.
“If she wanted to advise the governor, she could have called or texted him directly (she didn’t),” Gollust said through a spokeswoman. The claim is “farfetched,” the spokeswoman said, and “patently ridiculous.”
Not really.
The messages also revealed that the disgraced governor fed Gollust questions “he wanted to be asked by CNN during an interview that aired on March 28, 2020, regarding the coronavirus pandemic,” the sources told the Journal:
Ms. Gollust relayed the questions to a CNN producer in an email and told the producer to tell the anchor to ask them, those people said. Mr. Zucker was copied on the email as well, they said.…
The questions Andrew Cuomo had suggested were about the Rhode Island governor’s order that vehicles with New York license plates be stopped at the state line, as well as then-President Trump’s comments on a possible quarantine for New York, one of the people said. He was asked about these topics during the interview.
Zucker knew about the breach of CNN standards, such as they are.
Investigators, who worked for the law firm Cravath, Swaie & Moore, the Journal reported, asked Zucker and Gollust to surrender their phones. Zucker did, but Gollust “Gollust provided a phone that didn’t have all of the communications investigators were seeking, according to people familiar with the matter.”
“Investigators later asked Ms. Gollust for her BlackBerry, and she provided her newest BlackBerry device, they said,” the Journal reported:
Investigators later determined that they were still missing communications from Ms. Gollust, the people said. The investigators raised the issue to Ms. Gollust, and she handed in a third device, her older BlackBerry, they said.
Scandal Plagued
As for Chris Cuomo, CNN suspended and then canned him in December after New York’s attorney general revealed that he moonlighted as his brother’s PR man. The younger Cuomo tried to help his brother deal with sex-assault and harassment allegations.
Yet Chris Cuomo’s role as his brother’s advisor wasn’t the proximate cause of his departure. The network acted after it received a sex-assault allegation from a woman who worked with Cuomo years ago at ABC. That claim was the third sex-assault or harassment allegation against Cuomo. Two others surfaced in September.
Then Zucker went down, and finally Gollust.
The leftist network is also dealing with a pedophile problem.
The FBI arrested Cuomo’s former producer, John Griffin, in connection with a child-rape scheme he ran from his ski vacation home in Vermont.
Another producer, Rick Saleeby, who worked on The Lead With Jake Tapper, left the network after news surfaced that he solicited photos of and sought sex with an underage girl.
